OK I finally bit the bullet and bought one of these. It's also called a NAS. I got the Trendnet TS-S402, a cigar-box sized (8"x5"x5") box into which I snapped two Western Digital 2TB drives. The thing plugs into my router via an ethernet cable just like any other workstation, and it has a browser-based interface that lets you choose whether you want to see two 2TB drives (JBOD or "Just A Bunch Of Disks"), one 4TB drive (with data striped across the two drives), or a RAID1 configuration with one drive mirroring the other. The browser-based interface does all the work of configuring the drives into whatever you choose. I chose a 2TB mirrored RAID1 configuration for safety.
It couldn't have been easier to set up, and I carved a bunch of network shares out of it that my other workstations see just like any other shared drives.
In the end it cost about $600. $250 for the box and $150 each for the 2TB drives. And shipping and my time to set it up. For that I got effectively unlimited storage for movies, photos, music, my websites, etc. Wow.
I recommend this NAS very highly for price, ease of configuration, and access speed.
It couldn't have been easier to set up, and I carved a bunch of network shares out of it that my other workstations see just like any other shared drives.
In the end it cost about $600. $250 for the box and $150 each for the 2TB drives. And shipping and my time to set it up. For that I got effectively unlimited storage for movies, photos, music, my websites, etc. Wow.
I recommend this NAS very highly for price, ease of configuration, and access speed.